Jacob A. Riis: Photographer & Citizen. With Preface by Ansel Adams.
Riis, Jacob A. - Alland, Alexander (ed.):
Aperture, 1974. Oblonged 4to. Original large format heavy black cloth with gilt blindstamped title and unclipped well preserved and only slightly sunned dustjacket. 220 pp. Richly illustrated with well printed full page photographic plates. One of the best photobooks made with the material of Rii's work - . From the Introduction: "The remarkable journalist and reformer Jacob Riis was the forerunner in America's great tradition of documentary photography. This book brings together for the first time a full selection of Riis's photographs and a detailed account of his extraordinary years with a camera (.). Self-taught, he became America's first true journalist-photographer - a pioneer in the use of flash and in obtaining entry to and photographing previously inaccessible slum dwellings." . First edition, first printing (stated).
In 1870, the Danish immigrant Jacob Riis (1849-1914) arrived in New York City, aged twenty-one and penniless. This background stimulated his concern for the poor living conditions of inhabitants of the city’s Lower East Side. In time, his concern propelled him to become an important journalist and social reformer. In addition, he is now viewed as one of the founders of documentary photography.
Riis used the camera as a means to help improve the living conditions of the city's destitute. He was eager to apply the latest developments in the still young medium of photography and used his photographs as powerful illustrations for his lectures, articles, and books. During his lectures - a kind of ‘TEDX-talk’ avant la lettre- Riis would project the images using a magic lantern (a stereopticon). This made his lectures very popular, and by 1900 Riis had become a celebrated writer, journalist and public speaker who knew how to move influential friends such as Theodore Roosevelt (the later president of the United States), Andrew Carnegie and Booker T. Washington to implement reforms.
However successful Riis’s social efforts were, his photographs did not attract much attention for themselves. The technology to reprint them in books was still far from perfect, and the photograph was often used as the basis for drawings. The interest in his photographs started to grow after the Second World War, and it was only in 1946 - many years after his death - that the Museum of the City of New York organised the first major exhibition of his images.
The Other Half – The Activist Photography of Jacob Riis comprises vintage photographs by Riis and his contemporaries, prints from 1946 and more recent prints from 1994. Visitors can also see and listen to a reconstruction of one of his lectures. The exhibition includes a magic lantern as used by Riis during his lectures and a number of personal belongings such as his notebook.
The Museum of the City of New York houses the original complete compilation of Riis's pioneering works of photojournalism. This collection contains 191 vintage prints, 415 glass-plate negatives and 326 lantern slides by Jacob Riis.
The slums of New York
Jacob Riis documented the slums of New York, what he deemed the world of the “other half,” teeming with immigrants, disease, and abuse. A police reporter and social reformer, Riis became intimately familiar with the perils of tenement living and sought to draw attention to the horrendous conditions. Between 1888 and 1892, he photographed the streets, people, and tenement apartments he encountered, using the vivid black and white slides to accompany his lectures and influential text, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890 by Scribner’s. His powerful images brought public attention to urban conditions, helping to propel a national debate over what American working and living conditions should be.
A Danish immigrant, Riis arrived in America in 1870 at the age of 21, heartbroken from the rejection of his marriage proposal to Elisabeth Gjørtz. Riis initially struggled to get by, working as a carpenter and at various odd jobs before gaining a footing in journalism. In 1877 he became a police reporter for The New York Tribune, assigned to the beat of New York City’s Lower East Side. Riis believed his personal struggle as an immigrant who “reached New York with just one cent in my pocket”* shaped his involvement in reform efforts to alleviate the suffering he witnessed.
As a police reporter, Riis had unique access to the city’s slums. In the evenings, he would accompany law enforcement and members of the health department on raids of the tenements, witnessing the atrocities people suffered firsthand. Riis tried to convey the horrors to readers, but struggled to articulate the enormity of the problems through his writings. Impressed by the newly invented flash photography technique he read about, Riis began to experiment with the medium in 1888, believing that pictures would have the power to expose the tenement-house problem in a way that his textual reporting could not do alone. Indeed, the images he captured would shock the conscience of Americans.
Jacob August Riis, The Mulberry Bend, c. 1890, 7 x 6 inches from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1890 (The Museum of the City of New York)
Midnight rounds
At first Riis engaged the services of a photographer who would accompany him as he made his midnight rounds with the police, but ultimately dissatisfied with this arrangement, Riis purchased a box camera and learned to use it. The flash technique used a combination of explosives to achieve the light necessary to take pictures in the dark. The process was new and messy and Riis made adjustments as he went. First, he or his assistants would position the camera on a tripod and then they would ignite the mixture of magnesium flash-powder above the camera lens, causing an explosive noise, great smoke, and a blinding flash of light. Initially, Riis used a revolver to shoot cartridges containing the explosive magnesium flash-powder, but he soon discovered that showing up waving pistols set the wrong tone and substituted a frying pan for the gun, flashing the light on that instead. The process certainly terrified those in the vicinity and also proved dangerous. Riis reported setting two fires in places he visited and nearly blinding himself on one occasion.
Jacob August Riis, "A man atop a make-shift bed that consists of a plank across two barrels," c. 1890, 7 x 6 inches from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Charles Scribner's Sons:
New York, 1890 (The Museum of the City of New York)
Home and work
While it is unclear if Riis’ pictures were totally candid or posed, his agenda of using the stark images to persuade the middle and upper classes that reform was needed is well documented. A major theme of Riis’ images was the terrible conditions immigrants lived in. In the 1890s, tenement apartments served as both homes and as garment factories. “Knee-Pants at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen—A Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop” depicts the intersection of home and work life that was typical. Note the number of people crowded together making knickers and consider their ages, gender, and role. Each worker would be paid by the piece produced and each had his/her own particular role to fill in the shop which was also a family's home.
Jacob August Riis, "Knee-pants" at forty five cents a dozen—A Ludlow Street Sweater's Shop (detail), c. 1890, 7 x 6 inches from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1890 (The Museum of the City of New York)
While Riis did not record the names of the people he photographed, he organized his book into ethnic sections, categorizing the images according to the racial and ethnic stereotypes of his age. In this regard, Riis has been criticized for both his bias and reducing those photographed to nameless victims. “Knee-Pants,” appears in the chapter Jewtown and one can assume that the individuals are part of the large wave of Eastern European Jewish migration that flooded New York at the turn of the twentieth century.
Detail of the "Table of Contents," Jacob August Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1914
They are likely conversing in Yiddish and share some type of familial or neighborly connection. Some of the workers depicted might have lived in a neighboring New York City apartment or next door back in the old country. Home life, family relations and business relations, are intertwined. Just as it is impossible to know the names of the people captured in Riis’ image, and what Riis actually thought of them, one also cannot know their own impressions of the workplace, or their hopes and day-to-day challenges.
Jacob August Riis, "12 year old boy at work pulling threads. Had sworn certificate he was 16—owned under cross-examination to being 12. His teeth corresponded with that age," c. 1890, 7 x 6 inches, from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1890 (The Museum of the City of New York)
The work performed in tenements like these throughout the Lower East Side made New York City the largest producer of clothing in the United States. Under the contracting system, the tenement shop would be responsible for assembling the garments, which made up the bulk of the work. By 1910, New York produced 70% of women’s clothing and 40% of men’s ready-made clothing. That meant that the knee-pants and garments made by the workers captured in this Ludlow Street sweatshop were shipped across the nation. Riis’ photographs helped make the sweatshop a subject of a national debate and the center of a struggle between workers, owners, consumers, politicians, and social reformers.
The Progressive Era
Riis’ photographs are part of a larger reform effort undertaken during the Progressive Era, that sought to address the problems of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Progressives worked under the premise that if one studies and documents a problem and proposes and tests solutions, difficulties can ultimately be solved, improving the welfare of society as a whole. Progressives like Riis, Lewis Hine, and Jessie Tarbox Beals pioneered the tradition of documentary photography, using the tool to record and publicize working and housing conditions and a renewed call for reform. These efforts ultimately led to government regulation and the passage of the 1901 Tenement House Law, which mandated new construction and sanitation regulations that improved the access to air, light, and water in all tenement buildings.
Jessie Tarbox Beals, Child on Fire Escape, c. 1918,
for the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (Columbia University Libraries)
In the introduction to the How the Other Half Lives, Riis challenged his readers to confront societal ills, asking “What are you going to do about it? is the question of to-day.” It was a question of the past, but one that endures.
Essay by Miriam Bader
*Jacob Riis, The Making of An American, 2: 18
Additional resources:
Jacob A. Riis Photographic collection, The Museum of the City of New York
Lower East Side Tenement Museum virtual tour of the Levine family's home and sweatshop in 1897 at 97 Orchard Street, New York City
Ginia Bellafante, Discussion on How the Other Half Lives, The New York Times
Texts by Jacob Riis online bartleby.com
“Jacob Riis and the Other Half” website by Lisa Xie
Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York ( Chicago University Press, 2014).
Jacob Riis The Other half
In 1870 arriveerde de Deense immigrant Jacob Riis (1849-1914) op 21-jarige leeftijd in New York. Platzak en zonder werk, tot hij in 1873 een baan kreeg bij de Evening Sun. Riis was geïnteresseerd in de slechte woonomstandigheden van de inwoners van de Lower East Side en groeide uit tot een van de belangrijkste journalisten en sociaal-hervormers in het New York van rond de eeuwwisseling. Riis wordt beschouwd als één van de grondleggers van de documentaire fotografie. FOAM Amsterdam toont vanaf 16 februari werk van hem en tijdgenoten.
16 februari 2018
In de woning van een Italiaanse en haar kind in Jersey Street, 1888-1898. Foto Jacob Riis / Museum of the City of New York
Onder een vuilnisbelt gesitueerde woning van een Italiaan, 1892. Foto Jacob Riis / Museum of the City of New York
Een Afro-Amerikaan zit op een whiskeyvat in een zogenoemde Black and Tan-bar in Broome Street, in de buurt van Wooster Street, 1887-1888. Foto Jacob Riis / Museum of the City of New York
'Op de baby passen', 1892 Foto Jacob Riis / Museum of the City of New York
'5 cent per plekje'. Huurders in een overvol huis in Bayard Street, 1888-1889. Foto Jacob Riis / Museum of the City of New York
'Kniebroek voor 45 cent per dozijn'. Een truienwinkel in Ludlow Street, 1889-1890. Foto Jacob Riis / Museum of the City of New York
'Sliep vier jaar in die kelder', 1892.
Typische brandtrap bij een woning, dienend als een verlengstuk van het woonhuis, Allen Street, 1891. Foto Jacob Riis / Museum of the City of New York
Drie kinderen slapend op een metalen rooster, 1888. Foto Jacob Riis / Museum of the City of New York
'Bandits Roost'. Een steegje op Mulberry Bend, 1887-1888.
